Westly files complaint over spending by Angelides pal

Call out the campaign cops. There’s loose and unlicensed money flying around in the Democratic race for governor.

Controller Steve Westly sent out the first 9-1-1 call when he filed a complaint with the state Fair Political Practices Commission. Phil Angelides, he complained, was cheating.

According to a thick stack of documents, helpfully provided by Westly’s campaign, a $5 million independent expenditure committee that began running TV ads this week professing undying love for Angelides and his campaign for governor is anything but independent. Sacramento developer Angelo Tsakopoulous, a friend/mentor/supporter/partner and one-time employer of Angelides provided most of the cash for the committee and that’s just plain wrong, Westly’s backers argued.

Tsakopoulous, who has raised money for Angelides and even been reimbursed for expenses by the campaign, is way too close to the treasurer to be considered independent, they claimed.

“The law is clear that someone acting as an agent (for a campaign) just can’t step outside and form an independent expenditure committee,” said Garry South, a Westly adviser.

The rules say that an independent expenditure committee, which isn’t bound by the same fund-raising rules as a candidate for office, can no way, no how, have anything to do with the candidate it’s spending millions of dollars to support. Still, it would be virtually impossible to find anyone in Sacramento who believes that there aren’t plenty of winks, nods, nudges and soulful glances exchanged between a candidate’s campaign and his well-heeled independent backers.

Not so, said Cathy Calfo, Angelides’ campaign manager.

“Angelides 2006 learned of the independent expenditure campaign only through news accounts,” she said in a statement this afternoon.

But the treasurer had an equally direct approach to the cheating complaint, filing his own FPPC charges against Westly a few hours after being hit with the independent expenditure allegations.

Westly, the complaint charges, has used money from his now-defunct Westly 2006 controller re-election account to pay for expenses in the governor’s campaign, including pay checks for his campaign staff in 2005. If true, that’s against state spending rules.

“This is a ridiculous attempt to muddy the waters because (Angelides) has been caught red-handed,” said Nick Velasquez, a spokesman for Westly.

Don’t expect anything to be settled anytime soon. The election watchdogs at the FPPC, which handle all these complaints, are so strapped for funds they’ve been forced to cut staff and drop more than 200 investigations of alleged ethics violations.

The backlog is so great that the commission just recently finished work on the last case from the 2003 recall election.